Dehydration of potato slices following brief dipping in osmotic solutions: Effect of conditions and understanding the mechanism of water loss

Abstract

A novel variant of osmotic dehydration, named here as postdipping dehydration—where a material is dipped in a salt or sugar solution for a very short time followed by simple exposure to ambient conditions was explored with the aim of lowering water content of potato slices but at the same time not gain a high level of sugar/salt. The rate of water loss, which was rapid initially, was found to approach equilibrium. This article also explored whether the water loss process could subsequently be kick started once again, by employing a multistage process, where each stage consisted of osmotic solution dipping followed by ambient holding of the potato slices that had reached equilibrium in the earlier stage. Water loss values comparable to conventional osmotic dehydration could be achieved thus, but with significantly lower overall solid gain (<50%)—which can potentially yield a significantly healthy product option.

Keywords:

• Multistage dehydration
• osmotic dehydration
• postdipping dehydration
• process efficiency index
• solid gain

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The authors like to thank the Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia for supporting doctoral grant, and to the Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin, Malaysia for supporting one of the authors (Wan Mohd Fadli Wan Mokhtar) to study at the University of Reading, UK.